Click on a thumbnail to go to Google Books.
Loading... Mostly Dead Things (original 2019; edition 2019)by Kristen Arnett (Author)
Work InformationMostly Dead Things by Kristen Arnett (2019)
Books Set in Florida (15) Loading...
Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. No current Talk conversations about this book. I almost didn’t finish this book, was going to stop halfway through but I’m glad I stuck through it. I was getting really frustrated with the characters and their various psychosis, as well as their fraught relations with their deceased patriarch. The last third of the book, however, really provides and satisfying and realistic conclusion. ( ) For most of the book I found this family and its dynamics distressing and uncomfortable. That is a compliment to the writing, in that it so deftly evokes place and characters, but it was challenging. That said, I prefer that to the resolution. There's a turn in family dramas, generally, a moment where things hit a breaking point for the protagonist and they have to have a real conversation / make amends / find a new path. That turn didn't really work for me narratively, it didn't have the depth and the uncomfortable realness of the beginning. That doesn't even mean it's not true and real, just that I didn't feel it. Then again maybe I'd already disconnected from this boundary-less mess. Overall I think a talented writer, and a place and people I'll remember for quite a while. I don't think I've enjoyed a novel about the trials and tribulations of a disastrous family this much since Douglas Coupland's [b:All Families are Psychotic|3379|All Families are Psychotic|Douglas Coupland|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1405992884l/3379._SY75_.jpg|91467]. Kristen Arnett's writing is visceral, down to the most minute detail, characters are so acutely drawn you feel connected to them.
...it's darkly funny, both macabre and irreverent, and its narrator is so real that every time I stopped reading the book, I felt a tiny pull at the back of my mind, as if I'd left a good friend in the middle of a conversation. Arnett, who is based in Orlando and the author of the 2017 collection “Felt in the Jaw,” gets many things right in this first novel: the feeling of being trapped and vulnerable within one’s own family; the frustration of trying to look to the future when the past has “its teeth dug into you like a rabid animal”; how “love makes you an open wound, susceptible to infection”; and the manifold risks of swimming in a warm Florida lake, where if an alligator doesn’t get you, a brain-eating amoeba might. AwardsDistinctionsNotable Lists
Fiction.
Literature.
HTML: One morning, Jessa-Lynn Morton walks into the family taxidermy shop to find that her father has committed suicide, right there on one of the metal tables. Shocked and grieving, Jessa steps up to manage the failing business, while the rest of the Morton family crumbles. Her mother starts sneaking into the shop to make aggressively lewd art with the taxidermied animals. Her brother Milo withdraws, struggling to function. And Brynn, Milo's wife-and the only person Jessa's ever been in love with-walks out without a word. As Jessa seeks out less-than-legal ways of generating income, her mother's art escalates-picture a figure of her dead husband and a stuffed buffalo in an uncomfortably sexual pose-and the Mortons reach a tipping point. For the first time, Jessa has no choice but to learn who these people truly are, and ultimately how she fits alongside them. Kristen Arnett's debut novel is a darkly funny, heart-wrenching, and eccentric look at loss and love. .No library descriptions found. |
Current DiscussionsNonePopular covers
Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)813.6Literature English (North America) American fiction 21st CenturyLC ClassificationRatingAverage:
Is this you?Become a LibraryThing Author. |